Three years after launching their joint Kickstarter, the Armed Fantasia and Penny Blood projects are now in big trouble.
What are Armed Fantasia and Penny Blood?
Armed Fantasia is a spiritual successor to Sony’s Wild Arms cowboy themed RPG franchise. Wildbunch Productions, the studio making the game, is comprised of developers who worked on the original Wild Arms games.
Penny Blood is also a spiritual successor, this time for the Shadow Hearts horror RPGs. Studio Wildrose is also made up of former Shadow Hearts developers who have come together to make this game.
Why Did Their Kickstarter Grab A Lot Of Attention?
Wildbunch Productions and Studio Wildrose launched a joint Kickstarter for both projects last 2022. At that time, a lot of independently developed ‘spiritual successors’ of older AAA console games were finding success.
This gave many of these older developers hopes that their fans could help them go back to make the games they want to make.
Their Kickstarter successfully raised $ 2.5 million. Both games entered development, but it has not been smooth sailing in the last three years.
Trouble Starts Brewing For Penny Blood
Studio Wildrose sued publisher Dangen Entertainment last November 2024. Wildrose accused Dangen of not paying out their part of the $ 2.5 million to fund Penny Blood’s development.
Because Wildrose was not getting any money, they slowed down work on the game. They told their backers that they were looking for a new publisher at the same time that the news broke about the lawsuit.
As of this writing, Wildrose has been working on releasing art, novels, and music based on the Penny Blood universe.
Trouble Has Also Come For Armed Fantasia
Last March, Wildbunch shared this statement:
When we held the Kickstarter campaign for ARMED FANTASIA, we announced the game was scheduled to be released in March 2025, but after much discussion among the team and the developers, and as a result of the current progress of the project, it has been decided to review and postpone the launch date of ARMED FANTASIA.
We are truly sorry for the delay. We will continue to discuss the changed release date and other matters. I am unable to disclose any further specifics of the situation at this time, but since I was able to report this decision to you now, it should be clear that we are still moving things forward little by little.
Sadly, We Know What The Problem Is
Both Wildbunch and Wildrose just revealed that they don’t have a publisher for their games. It seems both are having problems with Dangen, who was supposed to be working with them and Kickstarter.
It’s clear that Dangen is responsible for their issues. But there’s a bigger problem looming for all the Kickstarters and crowdfunded ‘spiritual successors’ of the past three years.
Two months ago, Alzara Radiant Echoes also got cancelled. Its developer Studio Camelia also closed. Alzara was another Kickstarter game that made it far enough to make a vertical slice and get on the Steam wishlist system.
Unfortunately for Studio Camelia, they could not find a publisher to help finish their game, even after making the rounds of events like Tokyo Game Show and DICE.
Studio Camelia also revealed that their Kickstarter was not enough to finish production of their game. Many of these crowdfunding studios hope that their successful crowdfunds will get them publishers to pay for finishing the game.
A Bad Portent For Crowdfunded Games
If you’re thinking these studios should just fund to finish and publish their games, it’s not that simple. Becoming your own publisher means hiring more people, taking bigger risks, and requiring considerably more money to crowdfund.
In other words, self-publishing makes it that much harder for your game to succeed. And in particular, these 3D RPGs are not as easy to scale down as 2D platformers like Shovel Knight or Hollow Knight.
If you crowdfunded a game on or just before the last three years, that game could also be in trouble. These crowdfunds are facing the same bad business environment that’s caused the last three years of layoffs and studios closing.
If you’re lucky, your chosen crowdfund is still updating their backers. Hopefully they already released their products and met all their commitments. You should follow up on any projects that you may have backed and forgotten about right now.
